front cover of Gothic Sovereignty
Gothic Sovereignty
Street Gangs and Statecraft in Honduras
Jon Horne Carter
University of Texas Press, 2022

Gang-related violence has forced thousands of Hondurans to flee their country, leaving behind everything as refugees and undocumented migrants abroad. To uncover how this happened, Jon Carter looks back to the mid-2000s, when neighborhood gangs were scrambling to survive state violence and mass incarceration, locating there a critique of neoliberal globalization and state corruption that foreshadows Honduras’s current crises.

Carter begins with the story of a thirteen-year-old gang member accused in the murder of an undercover DEA agent, asking how the nation’s seductive criminal underworld has transformed the lives of young people. He then widens the lens to describe a history of imperialism and corruption that shaped this underworld—from Cold War counterinsurgency to the “War on Drugs” to the near-impunity of white-collar crime—as he follows local gangs who embrace new trades in the illicit economy. Carter describes the gangs’ transformation from neighborhood groups to sprawling criminal societies, even in the National Penitentiary, where they have become political as much as criminal communities. Gothic Sovereignty reveals not only how the revolutionary potential of gangs was lost when they merged with powerful cartels but also how close analysis of criminal communities enables profound reflection on the economic, legal, and existential discontents of globalization in late liberal nation-states.

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front cover of Jericho
Jericho
By Charles Bowden, Foreword by Charles D'Ambrosio
University of Texas Press, 2020

When Charles Bowden died in 2014, he left behind an archive of unpublished manuscripts. Jericho marks the fifth installment in his venerable “Unnatural History of America” sextet. In it he invokes the cycles of destruction and rebirth that have defined the ancient biblical city over millennia. From the ruins of Jericho’s walls Bowden reflects on the continuum of war and violence—the many conquests of the Americas; the US-Mexican War; the Vietnam War; and the ongoing militarization of our southern border—to argue against the false promise of security that is offered when men “build that wall.” Walls—both real and imagined—will always come tumbling down.

Along the way, Bowden tells stories of loss and violence, like that of David Hartley, who mysteriously vanishes on Falcon Lake; of murdered drug runners and their cartel bosses; and of a haunted sicario, or hitman, who is running from his past and compulsively confesses his sins as he searches for an absolution that will never come. Set against these scenes of trauma and violence are Bowden’s gorgeous meditations on nature: dancing cranes, soaring eagles, winding paths that traverse mountains, lakes, and deserts. And threaded throughout are the heroic narratives of men like Martin Luther King Jr., who defied the boundaries that surrounded him and was able to reshape the arc of history. Jericho is a remarkable affirmation of our shared humanity and a timely rejection of violence and nationalism by one of our most prophetic writers working at the height of his powers.

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The National Collegiate Athletic Association
A Study in Cartel Behavior
Arthur A. Fleisher III, Brian L. Goff, and Robert D. Tollison
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Intercollegiate sports is an enterprise that annually grosses over $1 billion in income. Some schools receive more than $20 million from athletic programs, perhaps as much as $10 million simply from the sale of football tickets.

Probing the history and business practices of the most powerful sports organization of colleges and universities in the United States, the authors present a persuasive case that the NCAA is in fact a cartel, its members engaged in classically defined restrictive practices for the sole purpose of jointly maximizing their profits.

This fresh perspective on the NCAA's institutional structure helps to explain why illicit payments to athletes persist, why non-NCAA organizations have not flourished, and why members have readily agreed on certain suspect rules.

Offering a valuable case study for sports analysts and students of economics and cartel behavior, this book is a revealing glimpse inside the embattled NCAA program.
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